[In the following review, Garvey argues that Damascus Gate succeeds both as a thriller and as an examination of spirituality, extolling its use of such elements as dark humor, adventure, and the quest for truth.]

Damascus Gate has a number of elements which will be familiar to Robert Stone's readers: drugs, alcohol, the threat of violence, death, and characters searching desperately for a meaning that eludes them. But this novel is unique in the way that it approaches, head-on, the theme that moves in the background of other Stone novels: a God who has withdrawn from the universe. In much of Stone's work there is a sense either that there is no God, and we need him, or there is a God, and he is guilty of having abandoned us. This is a kind of visceral, felt gnosticism. Here Stone has found the perfect vehicle for his vision: the mystical Jewish tradition of Lurianic Kabbalah. It will help to have read Gershom Scholem before reading this book.

But this is not to say that the book is a heavy read, or that it is freighted with theology, or even that you should read Scholem. As is always the case with Stone's work, Damascus Gate works on its own as a thrilling novel, perhaps his best. It takes place in Jerusalem, and the city is itself a central character. Christopher Lucas, a journalist fascinated with religion, agrees to work on a book with Dr. Pinchas Obermann, a psychiatrist who is fascinated by the “Jerusalem Syndrome.” Obermann offers a typical example: “A young man of scant prospects receives a supernatural communication. He must go to Jerusalem at the Almighty's command. Once here, his mission is disclosed. Often he is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.”

Lucas is the son of a Jewish father and his Catholic mistress. Another character, a jazz singer named Sonia Barnes, is the daughter of an African-American father and a Jewish mother. They find themselves drawn to each other, despite Lucas's not-so-unshakable skepticism and Sonia's involvement with Sufism and persistent desire to believe. Together they are drawn into the orbit of a strange pair: an old man from Louisiana, a Jew named Adam De Kuff, who has converted to and abandoned Catholicism to return to Judaism; and Raziel Melker, a former drug addict and jazz musician who studies the Kabbalah and convinces De Kuff that he is to be the agent of a great revelation, even the Messiah himself. We are introduced to both in Dr. Obermann's office. Once Stone has placed everyone on stage (it takes a while), he involves them in a plot that includes betrayal, gun-running, riots, and a scheme to destroy sacred sites. He brings it off beautifully.

One of Stone's many gifts is the sudden way his humor can intrude into bleakness, without making the bleakness any lighter or the humor any less funny. Early on, for example, Lucas finds himself in the company of a Palestinian who insists that Woody Allen has come to Jerusalem to lend support to the Palestinian cause. And late in the novel another wild rumor is put to practical use. At the same time, there are moments when Stone brings us through almost hallucinogenically intense passages, something which makes me think of Melville's powerful chapter on the whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick. He has done this in several of his novels (remember the scene on the island in Outerbridge Reach?) and he does it here. I can't think of anyone else who does this sort of thing so well.

The Kabbalah is a central part of Damascus Gate, and Stone is good at hinting at what it means just enough to intrigue us. The Kabbalah, like the apophatic theology of Eastern Orthodoxy and the mystical theology of The Cloud of Unknowing and John of the Cross, insists that the concealed Godhead (called “'Ein-Sof”) “dwells unknowable in the depths of its own being, without form or shape. It is beyond all cognitive statements, and can be named only through negation—indeed, the negation of all negations. No images can depict it, nor can it be named by any name” (Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead). God's creation and self-revealing proceed as emanations from this unknowable one (and even “one” could mislead).

Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Kabbalist, took an even more radical position: the 'Ein-Sof contracted itself, withdrew before any emanation, and is present in creation only as the broken shards left by the act of that withdrawing. This is a drastic oversimplification of a complex and beautiful set of teachings, but it is easy to see why it would appeal to Stone. After Lucas encounters this teaching, he turns to Pascal's Pensées “to look up something he half-remembered.”

“‘The universe is such that it bears witness everywhere to a lost God,’ Pascal had written, ‘in man and outside him and to a fallen nature.’”

In another place, Lucas visits the Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem; leaving it he prays, untypically, and thinks, “It might be … that the world divided there, into the race of those somehow responsible and those somehow not. It was a division personally difficult for him. But around it spun a fallen universe of shame. Everyone would always look into its darkness as deeply as they could or dared. Everyone wanted an answer, a guide for the perplexed. Everyone wanted death and suffering to mean something.”

This (like all Stone's works) is informed by the Melville-like desire to “strike through the mask,” and shows how strangely close nihilism and belief can be. What makes Stone's work extraordinary is that he is able to move us terrifyingly close to edges we would rather not look over, as many of the greatest novelists do—and at the same time he offers as exciting and exhilarating a read as any of the best thriller writers.

I can't think of much that William Trevor and Stone have in common as stylists, but I remember when I started reading Trevor's Fools of Fortune, which begins with a description of an idyllic Irish Protestant family, my first thought was, “What horrible fate does he have in store for these poor people?” You feel that way with all of Stone's characters too. But—even though people here wind up comatose, murdered, and unhappy—there is something almost hopeful in Damascus Gate; and certainly (as always in Stone) moments where beauty and hope, madness and despair, are brought very close to us. “It's a terrible fate to stand between the worlds,” Sonia tells Lucas at one point. “It's like madness.” And you are left even at the end wondering what genuine truths the failed messianic believers in this novel might be pointing toward, or if there is any final meaning at all to point to. There is a final truth, I fervently believe and hope, but Stone shows how close and at the same time how far apart are the worlds of the nihilist and the genuine believer. And if you feel uncomfortable with the ideas that crop up here, read the book as a great thriller. It works wonderfully at both levels.